“She’s the annoying one I told you about,” April said to Cates, who shrugged. Joe noticed Cates’s eyes had lingered on Lucy for a beat too long.
April turned back to Joe, her face expectant: “And there’s something I need to ask you and Mom.”
“Now probably isn’t the best time,” Cates cautioned, turning his attention from the hallway to April.
“It’s about the NFR in Las Vegas next month . . .”
Before Joe could object or April could make her case for attending the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas, Marybeth stepped into the kitchen doorway and said sharply, “Joe, can I talk to you for a minute?”
As he entered the kitchen in a dark rage, she kissed him on the cheek and said, “Welcome home.”
Joe grunted.
“The testosterone was getting so thick in there I could cut it with a knife.”
Cheyenne, Wyoming
Over Chugwater in southeastern Wyoming, Joe leaned over in the passenger seat of the governor’s Cessna Citation Encore small jet—dubbed Rulon One—and chanced a look outside the window. His stomach was in knots and his fingers gripped the armrests so tightly he was afraid he was leaving permanent impressions.
The terrain below was a sea of taupe and white: high prairie and patches of snow as far as he could see. There were a few skeletal trees choking the riverbeds, and the occasional lonely ranch building. Herds of cattle and pronghorn antelope dotted the terrain. If it weren’t for the commas of snow, the vista looked almost African, like documentary footage he’d seen of the Serengeti Plain. He was less than a half-hour from Cheyenne.
The accordion door for the cockpit folded and the copilot looked back at Joe with a mixture of amusement and malice. He looked too young and fresh-faced to be at the controls, Joe thought.
“How’s it going back there, partner?”
“Dandy,” Joe said sourly.
“Don’t like flying much, do you?”
Joe glared his response.
The copilot said with a smile, “There’s wind in Cheyenne—imagine that. It might be a little bumpy on the approach. Just pretend you’re riding a bull.”
“No thanks,” Joe said, thinking of the bull rider that had infiltrated his household.
• • •
DALLAS CATES hadn’t stayed for dinner the night before, despite April’s begging him. He’d mumbled something about “knowing where he wasn’t wanted” and said good night to Mr. Pickett and Mrs. Pickett and thanked them for their hospitality while he gathered his NFR coat. April went outside with him to say good-bye.
“You remember that character Eddie Haskell on Leave It to Beaver?” Joe asked Marybeth.
“I was just thinking the same thing,” she said, moving a steaming casserole dish of lasagna from the oven to the range top to cool. “What is it between you two?”
“I don’t like him.”
“That was obvious.”
“Good.”
“I’ll go let Lucy know we’re ready to eat,” Marybeth said, trying to stifle a smile. After she passed Joe, she paused in the doorway and looked back.
“There’s something else, isn’t there?”
“I have to go to Cheyenne tomorrow.”
“The governor called?”
Joe nodded.
He felt her eyes on him.
“Let’s talk about this tonight,” Joe said, not wanting April to return in mid-conversation.
• • •
DINNER HAD BEEN FROSTY. April sat fuming and pushing bits of food around on her plate after returning to the house. Joe had noted that it took her ten minutes to say good-bye to Dallas Cates, but he didn’t remark on it.
Marybeth tried to elevate the mood by saying things like “Isn’t this nice to all be around to eat dinner together?” but her words seemed to clunk against the walls. Joe noticed that Lucy warily looked from her mom to April to Joe, waiting for the fireworks to begin.
Finally, Lucy asked if she could go to the movies on Friday night.
“With who?” Marybeth asked.
“Noah.”
Joe grimaced. Noah After Buffalo was a Northern Arapaho from the reservation school. He was bright, polite, and handsome. Lucy had met him at a debate tournament where they competed against each other in dramatic interpretation. He seemed like a smart, well-adjusted boy. Still . . .
Marybeth asked, “Is he picking you up?”
“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “We haven’t figured that out yet.”
“Is he buying your ticket?”
Lucy shrugged.
Marybeth said, “When you get this all figured out, we can talk.”
Lucy sighed a heavy, put-upon sigh.
“Have you heard from Sheridan?” Joe asked Marybeth.
“A couple of texts,” she said. “She needs me to send her winter coat. I don’t know how she forgot it. And she needs some money for books.”
Joe waited for more, but that was it.
“She called me this afternoon and didn’t leave a message,” he said. “I was wondering if you knew why.”
Marybeth looked up, concerned. “No.”
“I’ll try her again later,” Joe said. “She never answers her phone.”
“Try texting.”
“I hate texting,” Joe grumbled.
After a beat of silence, April slammed down her fork and glared at Joe.
“Tell me why I can’t go to the NFR.” She leaned forward and bared her teeth. “Tell me why.”
“You’ll miss school,” Joe said.
“I’m getting all A’s and B’s,” April said. “I can take a few days off. I’m a senior, you know. I’m going to graduate.”
Joe looked at Marybeth for support.
Marybeth said, “April, how would you even get to Las Vegas? Where would you stay? How could you afford it?”
“Don’t worry about that,” April said. “I’ve got it covered. It won’t cost you a dime.”
“That’s not it,” Joe said, trying not to let his anger show in his voice. He knew she had a point.
“No, it isn’t, is it?” April said. “This is about Dallas.”
Joe said, “Yup.”
Marybeth said, “April, you need to give us some details. You need to have a plan before we can even consider it. So far, I haven’t heard anything.”
Joe noted the crack in their united front.
“You and your plans,” April said, rolling her eyes. Then: “Look, I can take care of myself. I’ve got a job and a car. You people forget I’m friggin’ eighteen.”
“And he’s twenty-four,” Joe said.
April turned on him and shouted, “Aha! I knew that was the reason.”
“It’s a big one.”
April sat back in her chair and shook her head as if she couldn’t believe the incredible ignorance she was hearing. She said, “This is Dallas Cates, PRCA champion bull rider. He could have asked any girl on the planet to go to the NFR and watch him ride, and he asked me. Me! And you two act like I’m too stupid and immature to know what I’m doing.”
Joe said, “Well . . .”
“The hell with both of you,” April cried out, and pushed away from the table. She rose and did an aggressive shoulder roll before stomping down the hallway toward her room. The slam of the door made the pictures on the walls jump—again.
“I’ll go talk with her,” Marybeth said, getting up.
When she was gone, Lucy looked to Joe with her eyebrows arched and said, “April. She’s b-a-a-a-a-a-ck.”
• • •
IN BED, Marybeth put down her book and asked Joe what it was about Dallas Cates, besides the age difference, that bothered him.
Joe said, “Do you remember the name Serda Tibbs?”
Marybeth’s reaction indicated she did.
Eleven years before, when Joe had been on the job in the Saddlestring District for only two years, he’d heard the call from the sheriff’s department over the mutual aid channel. A half-naked girl had been picked up by a deputy while walking away from town down a rural county road. The few clothes she had on were ripped and dirty, and she was bruised and appeared to be in shock. If it hadn’t been in September when the weather was mild, she might have died of exposure out on that road.
Serda Tibbs was a sophomore and new student at Saddlestring High School. Her parents had recently moved from the Deep South, and her father was out of town on a roughneck crew. Under questioning, she said she could barely remember what had happened to her after she’d left after school with a group of local boys who said they were going to show her around the county. The boys were popular and well known, all of them athletes and older than her. Her blood alcohol level indicated she’d been drinking heavily, but she said something had happened to her beyond that. The medical tech at the hospital suspected she’d been slipped a date-rape drug although the testing was inconclusive. They did confirm, though, she’d been assaulted and left on the side of the county road. Because she was new and didn’t know where she was, she had walked the wrong way to get back to town.
Four boys were arrested, all members of the football team. Joe had no involvement in the investigation, but he knew how the crime rocked the community. The boys eventually confessed and the two younger perpetrators were sent to a juvenile facility and the older two to the state prison in Rawlins. Serda Tibbs withdrew from high school and her family moved to Oklahoma.
“How does Dallas figure into this?” Marybeth asked Joe.
He said, “Serda never named all the boys involved, because she was so damaged by it, but Deputy Reed told me he suspected it was five of them, not four.”
Reed was now the sheriff of Twelve Sleep County.
“He always thought the fifth was Dallas Cates,” Joe said. “Dallas wouldn’t admit to it, and the other boys didn’t name him. Reed said he thought they were scared of what he would do to them, and he could never make a case. Dallas was the big shot at the school then, if you’ll remember. That’s when he was winning the high school finals and state wrestling. He had an ability to intimidate his competition then, and he still does. Reed suspected he intimidated those other boys to keep their mouths shut.”
“My God,” Marybeth said. “And he was in our house.”
Joe nodded. “We need to keep him away.”
“Should you tell April?”
Joe nodded.
Marybeth was still for a long time. Then she said, “Do you think it will make any difference?”
“I’m not sure,” Joe confessed.
He hadn’t slept well the rest of the night, and was at the airport looking at the sky for Rulon One an hour before he needed to be there.
• • •
“MAGIC CITY OF THE PLAINS dead ahead,” the copilot announced through the open accordion door. “Welcome to Cheyenne—the three hundred fifty-fourth most populous metropolitan area in the United States.”
Joe nodded grimly and gripped the armrests.
“As I said, it’s likely to be a little bumpy.”
“I’m getting used to it,” Joe said, as much to himself as to the copilot.
That morning, before leaving his house, he’d stuffed Sheridan’s winter coat into his backpack.
• • •
THE DIRECTOR of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Lisa Greene-Dempsey, was inside the cinder-block state terminal to greet him. Joe was surprised. Director LGD, as she preferred to be called, had been in her job for a little over a year, and her philosophy and policies were beginning to take effect throughout the agency. Her goal from the beginning was to “modernize” the agency, turning it from what some called the Wyoming “Guts and Feathers” Department into a more progressive body that embraced diversity, wildlife appreciation, and environmental stewardship. Nearly a dozen longtime game wardens and fifteen percent of the headquarters administration had retired.
Director LGD was wiry, fidgety, and wore rimless glasses that made her eyes look bigger than they were and gave her a perpetually startled look. She had short, straight brown hair parted on the center-left and a habit of waving her fingers like a pair of flushing birds when she talked.
She strode up to Joe as he entered the terminal and grasped his hand with an exaggerated motion and said, “How are you doing, Joe?”
“Fine, boss,” he said warily as she pumped his hand.
“When I heard you were coming today, I thought I’d take the opportunity to ride with you to the capitol.”
He nodded politely.
She grasped his arm and steered him through the terminal toward a waiting green departmental SUV. Her administrative assistant, named Brandi Forgey, was at the wheel. LGD climbed into the backseat with Joe.
“Brandi,” LGD said, “take us to the capitol and use the scenic route, please.”
Forgey nodded and put the SUV into gear. The ride to the governor’s office normally took less than ten minutes.
“We don’t have much time before we get there,” LGD said, leaning toward Joe. He fought an urge to recoil.
“I need you to give him a message for me.”
“Does this mean you’re not going to be in the meeting?” Joe asked her.
LGD shook her head abruptly and forged on. “I haven’t been asked. This arrangement the governor has with you is very unusual, and I can’t say I like it. The governor doesn’t seem to honor our system of chain of command and structure. Neither, frankly, do you.”
Joe shrugged with a what-can-I-do? gesture.
“We’re not close, the governor and I,” she said, looking away from Joe. “I’ve been instructed to communicate with the governor’s staff via email. He prefers it that way.”
“Oh?” This was news.
“He’s a busy man. Anyway, our agency desperately needs a new appropriation the next fiscal year to open our pilot WAC.”
Joe looked back, puzzled. “WAC?”
“Wildlife Appreciation Center,” she said with irritation. “Haven’t you been keeping up with my ‘Memos from the Director’?”
He was caught. Since taking over, Director LGD had been sending out electronic memos to all employees about her plans for modernizing the agency. Joe had stopped reading them months ago.
“Sorry,” he said. Then: “But I did finally retrieve that pickup from the top of the mountain . . .”
She dismissed his sentence with a wave of her hand. “Not now, Joe.”
“I thought that was important to you,” Joe said.
“Not as important as the WAC program,” she said. “Anyway, we sent the proposed language to the governor’s office six weeks ago so he could request the funding from the legislature and put it in his State of the State address. He hasn’t even responded. We really need him on board with this.”
Joe shook his head. “So you’re asking me . . . what?”
She bore in. “To urge his support for the program. We can’t expand our mission beyond blood sports unless the governor is behind it.”
He cringed. Joe hated when hunting and fishing were called “blood sports.” Most of the hunters and anglers he knew, both male and female, did so out of tradition or for subsistence or taste for wild game. Blood was a by-product. Plus, a growing number of anglers practiced catch-and-release.
“Oh, look,” Brandi Forgey said as she eased to the curb in front of the gold-domed capitol building. “We’re here already.”
Something dark passed over Director LGD’s face, and she turned toward her driver.
“You were supposed to take the scenic route.”
“Sorry,” Brandi Forgey sang.
“Well, I had better be going,” Joe said. As he did, he saw a twinkle in Bra
ndi Forgey’s eye reflected in the rearview mirror. It was in that little signal that occurred silently between staffers that they recognized that neither had much respect for their mutual boss. Joe tried not to wink back.
“Don’t forget to ask him about the WAC program!” Director LGD called out to Joe while he quickly gathered his backpack and climbed out of the SUV. There was a real strain of desperation in her voice.
As he walked across the brown grass toward the steps of the building, he again thought there was no way he could ever work among the politicians. He’d rather be on top of a windswept mountain with the likes of Dave Farkus.
• • •
LOIS FORNSTROM, the governor’s personal secretary, recognized Joe immediately and waved him through the anteroom to Rulon’s office. Several people sat in worn lounge chairs, obviously waiting for a word with the governor. A stocky man in an ill-fitting suit with a briefcase on his lap objected, saying he had been waiting for two hours. To Joe, he looked like a lobbyist of some kind—a slickster.
“He’s come all the way from Saddlestring,” Fornstrom said without sympathy.
“I came from Arlington, Virginia!” the man said, red-faced.
Joe stayed out of it and smiled at Fornstrom and entered Rulon’s private office. He closed the door behind him.
The governor was on the phone when he entered, and he looked up and waved Joe toward one of two chairs in front of his desk. Joe took off his hat and put it crown-down on the other chair and waited.
The governor had two offices—a larger public room used for bill signings, press conferences, and small groups, and this close and intimate office, which was dark, book-lined, and cluttered with memorabilia. A buffalo skull embedded with an ancient stone arrowhead dominated the wall behind the governor, and a tooled John Wayne Winchester Model 1873 lever-action carbine rested on a deer antler mount. Rulon had once told Joe he kept it loaded. Joe didn’t doubt it.
Rulon said into the phone, “You read the legislation, so why are you asking me? It says if you send any of your agents into our state to enforce federal gun laws, we’ll arrest them and throw them into the pokey. That’s what it says, that’s what I signed, and that’s what we’ll do.”